US FCC chief asks Apple, Google to remove TikTok from app stores

San Francisco: The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) head Brendan Carr has written to Apple and Google requesting them to remove Chinese short-video making platform TikTok from their respective app stores for “its pattern of surreptitious data practices.” In the letter, Carr said that TikTok “harvests swaths of sensitive data that new reports show are being accessed in Beijing”.
“As you know TikTok is an app that is available to millions of Americans through your app stores, and it collects vast troves of sensitive data about those US users,” he wrote to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
“TikTok is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance — an organisation that is beholden to the Communist Party of China and required by the Chinese law to comply with PRC’s surveillance demands,” Carr said in the letter.
Last week, BuzzFeed News reported that China-based employees of internet giant ByteDance have repeatedly accessed data about US TikTok users.
Also Read Facebook testing new ways to organise, quickly access Groups The report cited leaked audio from more than 80 internal TikTok (owned by ByteDance) meetings, engineers in China had access to US data between September 2021 and January 2022.